White House Religious Liberty Commission Releases ‘Embarrassing’ Report

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Religious Liberty for Christian Nationalists

Trump’s White House Religious Liberty Commission released a 224-page draft report on Friday afternoon, delivering a tome that is at once an homage to Christian nationalism and a roadmap for the United States Department of Justice to embrace. At the center of the report is an attack on the wall of separation between church and state, which Christian nationalists falsely contend is a “myth.” Instead, the report argues for a “better analogy” that “religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.” 

A bridge, that is, between Christian nationalists and an authoritarian state that privileges their rights over everyone else’s.

Trump created the Commission by executive order last year, and stacked it with mostly right-wing evangelicals, a smattering of Catholic leaders, and one Jewish member, all of whom endorse the Christian nationalist claim that America was founded as a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” nation, according to a lawsuit filed against the Commission by The Interfaith Alliance and other faith groups. The draft report embraces an array of Christian nationalist persecution complexes and anti-trans hobbyhorses, such as claims that COVID-19 vaccine requirements violated religious freedom, and that public school officials “have sought to impose a new radical orthodoxy on parents and kids,” which leaves “boys and girls confused about how God made them.”

Micah Schwartzman, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Virginia School of Law, called the report “an embarrassing document,” noting, in just one example, that it blames Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and other proponents of “a new philosophy” that “emerged in Europe, which laid the intellectual foundations for threats to American religious liberty.” 

Beyond European philosophers, there are other culprits cited in the report as enemies of religious liberty — claims just as divorced from reality as the core assertion that the term “wall of separation” has been “reappropriated to signify something that operates more like a ‘Berlin wall’ of separation between church and state than a mutually respectful boundary.” The report contends that “transgender ideology,” which another section of the report describes as a “new radical orthodoxy,” finds its roots in “the third-century Gnostic dualism, which posits that there is a gulf of separation between the spirit and the physical world, which it sees as intrinsically evil.” The report concludes that in the 20th century, “this age-old ideology began to take hold of American institutions and paved the way for the progressive activist movement to accumulate power at the expense of parents, families, churches, and individuals.” 

Trump’s executive order dictated that the Commission be housed at the DOJ; now, in its report, the Commission recommends that Trump “instruct” the DOJ “to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” The report also says Trump should “instruct” the DOJ, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “to create religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals for students, parents, teachers, healthcare workers, and others to obtain support in the face of religious liberty violations and increase public awareness of existing reporting channels.” To ensure such a snitch state function to pursue violations of other Americans’ rights is upheld, the Commission also recommends the nomination and confirmation of federal judges “with a history of showing courage to decide religious liberty cases on the merits where warranted, rather than engage in improper judicial avoidance.”

The report’s authors note that there is a 15-day public comment period, although the document does not say where to submit a comment.

More Founder Fabulists

Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins spotted House Speaker Mike Johnson attributing a quote, often used by Christian nationalists, to John Quincy Adams in his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington on Saturday. The phrase, “duty is ours, results are God’s,” Jenkins has reported, is “an axiom quoted by Christian nationalist leaders affiliated with groups such as Wallbuilders, the organization run by activist David Barton,” probably the figure most responsible for embedding the “myth of separation” in the Christian nationalist consciousness. According to Jenkins’ reporting last year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has also used it, attributing it to “the Founders” and Adams. But, “like other dictums embraced by Christian nationalists, the sourcing is dubious,” Jenkins wrote. “Researchers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which holds Adams family papers, told RNS they couldn’t find any instance of Adams using the phrase.”

Off-the-Charts Corruption Continues Apace

Children of Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stand to profit from a $1.6 billion dollar agreement between the Commerce Department and a “little-known American company” to mine in Kazakhstan for tungsten, a metal essential for the manufacturing of weaponry and computer chips. The Kazakhstan deal, the New York Times reports, “is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.”

Trump’s Great American State Fair Is Terrible

“The U.S. capital has been outfitted of late with visual trappings that many associate with authoritarianism, such as banners depicting Donald Trump’s face and featuring his slogans. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before the president erected his own Potemkin village: the Great American State Fair, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be,” is Kelsey Ables’ lede in a quietly devastating and deliciously detailed review of a marquee event in Trump’s “patriotic” celebration of America’s 250th birthday. About the replica “triumphal” arch erected on the National Mall as a preview of the larger monstrosity Trump wants to build across the Memorial Bridge, Ables writes that it “appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.” 

JD Vance and Watergate

Historian Rick Perlstein reminds us that, despite the furor Vice President JD Vance caused last week by laughing off Watergate and saying it would be a 12-hour news story today, minimizing Watergate and trying to pass it off as a prank or harmless campaign antic is a long Republican tradition. 

Why Todd Blanche Will Have to Talk More About Jeffrey Epstein at His Confirmation Hearings

Marcy Wheeler explains how journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit to compel the release of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act raises even more questions that Blanche will have to answer about DOJ’s ongoing withholding of documents at his upcoming confirmation hearings to be attorney general.

How Trump Is Dismantling the Federal Civil Service

This important New York Times story about the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) may on the surface seem to be only of interest to D.C. insiders, but it gets to the heart of Trump’s campaign to politicize the federal civil service for his own ends. Led by a White House staffer, James Sherk, who previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, “churning out policy papers about waste and abuse within the civil service,” the administration pressured the MSPB, in a case involving the firing of immigration judges, to take up “a constitutional argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would invalidate its own existence, siding in favor of presidential power.” 

Police State 

ICE agents have been criss-crossing New York State, hunting down citizens who had been critical of the agency’s lethal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. They went to the Rochester home of David Streever, who had written a letter to then-ICE director Todd Lyons comparing the agency’s tactics to Nazis. Not finding him there, chillingly, agents then tracked him down at a hotel room in New York City as he was en route home from an overseas trip. In another instance, agents found Paigelynne Gonyea, who had posted about the murder of Renee Good on Instagram, and confronted her where she was serving as a poll worker in Syracuse in New York’s primary two weeks ago. “Another poll worker captured the visit on video. It was so wild, the Republican elections commissioner called a contact at Homeland Security to confirm it wasn’t a hoax,” Syracuse.com reports. 

What a Difference a Year and a Historic Election Makes

Budapest held its first Pride march since the anti-LGBTQ authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Trump ally was voted out of office in April. Last year, under Orbán’s leadership, the government passed constitutional amendments attacking LGBTQ rights, including banning pride events, which had the effect of turning the scheduled march into a massive anti-government demonstration, drawing an estimated 200,000 people, and foreshadowing Orban’s ouster.